The World’s Fifth-Largest Electrical Company Is Using an Ethereum Dapp

One of the world’s largest electrical companies is teaming up
with ethereum app iExec on a new test.

EDF, the fifth largest electrical utility company with a $33
billion market cap, has launched its visual simulator software
GPUSPH on iExec, a decentralized application that operates on
ethereum mainnet. With this, EDF can test how the program
operates on a blockchain rather than a more normal computing
environment.

Specifically, the simulator explores a field called “smoothed
particle hydrodynamics” for modeling fluids. It’s technical in
nature, but the general idea is that the GPUSPH application is
useful for studying all sorts of things, like water dams, for
example, or even . EDF is trying
to determine whether ethereum adds any benefits to the
simulator, which typically runs on a GPU.

As EDF blockchain engineer Gilles Deleuze told CoinDesk:

“In a wider perspective, […] development of distributed
computing is a credible scenario for the future, and
blockchain may be a nice lever in this scenario. So, let’s
explore it.”

Originally an extension of a decade-old research project, iExec
is one of the longer-running ethereum apps, launched in 2016 to
explore the concept of cloud computing on the blockchain. While
the world of cloud computing is currently dominated by large
companies, like Amazon, they’re trying to decentralize the form
of computing on ethereum.

iExec head of innovation and adoption Jean-Charles Cabelguen
argued to CoinDesk that the advantages of using iExec for
GPUSPH are many, including clear monitoring of the state and
computational power of the app and increased “resilience” of
the app, as it’s running on a decentralize network.

But perhaps one of the most pressing problems ethereum faces is
that it doesn’t scale well, at least not yet. But iExec argues
they’ve come around with their own scaling solution to at least
ensure their dapp is scalable.

“The heavy computing is done off-chain and does not overwhelm
ethereum. Afterward, blockchain is used to reach a consensus on
the validity of computation’s results. A hash of this result is
stored on the blockchain,” Cabelguen said.

That said, EDF thinks the technology is worth
exploring. Deleuze even added that EDF plans to launch
other experiments on iExec in the future, stating:

“The plan is to continue with other open scientific codes
requiring possibly other types of workerpools.”

image via
Shutterstock

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